Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion
crookedtimber.org
crookedtimber.org
I will try to keep "yes, this is hard" in my mind on future conversations. Especially with my family. The point is I want their points. Not that I want them to bend to my will.
Since when do we expect classes to be social events? If I want to learn with other learners then I don't really need a teacher, or a classroom, actually. I need a forum, a la stackoverflow, and a good doc/book.
The view of a classroom as being a conduit where the teacher transmits knowledge from their brain into the students is entirely outdated. That's not how learning works.
To learn, you have to process information, build understanding. One way that has been shown to work quite well at this is to make students explain to each other and challenge each other.
You may have heard the phrase "I didn't really learn this until I had to teach it", which is another reflection of the same thing; the act of explaining to other people improves your understanding.
Not to mention that it also improves your skills at things like making a coherent argument and working with other people, which are quite useful skills to have in life.
If this doesn't work for you, you don't need the teacher either. After all, what can they tell you that you can't just read in the textbook?
I've learned lots of information from classes by just paying attention to the lectures and doing no out of class studying/conversations unless I had particular trouble with something, in a wide range of subjects like physics from Newton's laws to relativity, various history classes, music theory, epistemology, calculus. Is this that unusual of an experience?
One of my most interesting experiences was US history Class in high school. The teacher was supposedly boring as hell (like that guy from ferris bueller). I kind of went into a trance in but recalled quite a bit of facts and did great on his tests.
Now did I really grok the subject? Perhaps not.
- Either you do see the classroom as a conduit of knowledge from teachers to students. Indeed, that's not all there is to learning, you need to understand and exercise your new knowledge, but that happens in a different time, outside the classroom.
- Or you see knowledge transmission as a more or less autonomous task and you favor social interactions between students to help them "build understanding" as you suggest. In that case the teacher (and, arguably, the classroom) is not necessary anymore.
I fail to see why you would want a classroom and teacher if you are in the position 2.
I know something it is that if I were to pay for a class, I would want to have more than a bunch of people equally ignorant as I am trying to understand a thing together. I would want an experienced teacher giving us the core knowledges. But again, I mostly live in the IT world, where such a class is almost never necessary.
* get an immediate assessment of students' understanding
* provoke deep processing by the students who participate
* Draw out students who are otherwise passive and disengaged
* Learn what subtopics are particularly interesting to the class, and adapt the schedule accordingly
* Allow students to experience the process of active learning rather than having everything handed to them
* Other things...
It's not an either/or situation, it's a tactic. A good teacher will use open-ended discussion for all of those things and more, but it isn't the only thing going on in a typical class. Ultimately, the teacher is still there imparting knowledge. The discussion is just one of the ways that's done, and a high quality discussion can be extremely valuable.
- There needs to be a hook for the discussions. In many cases, the profs baited that hook by choosing papers that contradicted or complemented each other. For example, it's fairly easy to get a self-sustaining discussion going on whether Theory A seems plausible. Papers 1-3 show data that they claim supports it, but the experiments in 4-5 seem to refute it. Hashing this out--and watching others do so--is probably even more useful than whatever the ostensible topic of the class may be.
This works really well when there is a legitimate debate. It can sorta kinda work if there was some debate but the question has been settled pretty conclusively. Some students can be asked to play the losing side (e.g., the pro-luminiferous aether folks in a physics class). It does not work well at all for things like methods papers or situations where the debate is so remote or unfathomable (e.g., I would not teach calculus or programming like this)
You can sometimes get away with "what did you like or dislike about this paper?", but this often veers into a discussion of methodology (which may or may not be the goal).
However, I think a good selection of papers typically led to good discussions, while even the best-prepared list of discussion questions couldn't do much to provoke interesting debates about a random walk through the literature.
- Everyone needs to have a pretty solid background. We tried a similar format with 1st and 2nd year undergrads and it was not a smashing success. The conversation kept bottoming out in places where students did not know enough to ask/answer questions or connect it with other things that weren't explicitly in the reading (This is probably more of an issue with science or social science; I imagine it happens less in literature classes). The undergrads were also very reluctant to question published papers.
One class attempted to circumvent this with a mixed format. The Thursday classes were lectures. A guest professor would lecture for ~90 minutes on their field of research. These served as background material for 3-5 papers that were the assigned reading. On the following Tuesday, students (+ the professors coordinating the course) discussed the papers. The guest lecturer would return for the discussion and act as a sort of 'expert witness' who could answer questions.
- This format works well when the atmosphere is fairly casual and the students are comfortable with each other. This probably imposes an upper limit of 15-20 students/class or so.